Jelly Bean for all: Google publishes Android 4.1 code

In a message posted last night on the official Android Building mailing list, Google developer Jean-Baptiste Queru announced the availability of the Android 4.1 source code. The code has landed in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and is now available to independent developers.

Android 4.1, which is codenamed Jelly Bean, introduces a number of noteworthy technical improvements under the hood. It includes significant performance optimizations that boost the responsiveness of Android’s user interface. It was launched at Google I/O last month and debuted on Google’s impressive new Nexus 7 tablet device.

New versions of Android are typically developed by Google and its hardware partners behind closed doors. After a new version launches on a hardware product, Google publishes the source code and makes it available through the AOSP code repository.

Android enthusiasts eagerly anticipate each code drop because the availability of source code opens the door for third-party developers to build custom Android ROM images based on the new version of the platform. Such ROM images make it possible for users to manually install new versions of Android on their handsets and tablets.

Now that Jelly Bean is in the wild, CyanogenMod and other popular community-driven Android variants that are developed downstream can begin incorporating the code.

What are the system requirements? How far back can CyangenMon bring JB-there are some decent older tablets that would do well with a proper tablet oriented OS rather than 2.3 or even 2.2.

I can't find the article right now,but as far as I've read - JB(and ICS before it) ought to run adequately on the same hardware as most Froyo/GB's. I know it's apples and oranges, but I've seen ICS work decently enough as far back (in terms of hardware) on a MSM7225-powered handset with a measly 256MB RAM and no discrete GPU(An old Huawei U8160/VF SMART which I'm using to .. play around with AOSP/CM),so those tablets you mentioned should be OK to use (provided industrious devs provide the proper device hardware support )

Have a look through their list of supported devices.If you've got an oddball build of a device (e.g. a US Cellular variety Galaxy-SomethingOrOther...) you may need to go hunting for an unsupported/community build of the CM code.

I've been using CM since back in the HTC Hero days. The official builds are solid. The community builds are decent. There's probably a working version for your device, unless you're stuck in the stone ages.

Just make sure you don't fail to follow basic instructions; un-bricking devices, while academically interesting, does not make for a fun evening.

Keep the info coming. It's good that 4.1 improves "Teh Snappy", but how is memory footprint and overall performance compared to previous versions? Will older phones (2011? 2010? 2009?) that currently run 2.x benefit from Jelly Bean, or would they get bogged by bloat?

What are the system requirements? How far back can CyangenMon bring JB-there are some decent older tablets that would do well with a proper tablet oriented OS rather than 2.3 or even 2.2.

Given that The Goog doesn't support ICS on the Nexus One, and that it's not a target for CM9 either, you can consider that to be a baseline. Stuff more powerful than the Nexus One/HTC Desire should be fine.

That being said, it's really about internal storage and RAM. The N1 and Desire have the power, but not the storage.

Remember when Honeycomb happened, there was no source drop, and Android haters crowed about how Google was selling out its fanbase and developer base, claiming Google would never release source code again and that they were no better than Microsoft?

Such ROM images make it possible for users to manually install new versions of Android on their handsets and tablets.

Highly dependent on the SoC and such used in the product, from what i can tell. Some are very difficult to find usable driver code for.

The point I think the author was making was that without the source code, custom ROMs would be mostly non-existent... The SoC is irrelevant in this case -- every phone could have the same SoC, but without source, you wouldn't see any custom ROMs. Granted, various SoC's makes things harder, but far from impossible.

bk109 wrote:

I can't find the article right now,but as far as I've read - JB(and ICS before it) ought to run adequately on the same hardware as most Froyo/GB's. [...]

hobgoblin wrote:

So anything below 512MB RAM is basically futile, and you really need 1GB+ to be relatively comfortable.

bk109 has it right here. ICS runs well on older hardware, and it definitely doesn't need 1GB+ of RAM to run. It runs much smoother on my old Droid X than Gingerbread ever did (both stock and custom ROMs), and the phone has 512MB of RAM. Considering that JB has a large focus on performance, it *should* run even better on the hardware. However, that depends on how much of the performance improvements come from offloading operations to GPUs, which are poor/lacking in older devices.

Hardware requirements haven't increased too much. If you have enough RAM and internal storage then you will be fine on that count. The main issue is binary drivers. It's (relatively) easy if there is an official ROM on that version of Android. If there's not, the community can usually hack something together given a few weeks/months. The issue there is that nobody's going to spend their time screwing around with a two or three year old phone that almost everyone has abandoned. If it's a newer phone (within the past year) or a phone with common guts then there's a very good chance you will be able to install JB soon, if it's older, maybe not.

So anything below 512MB RAM is basically futile, and you really need 1GB+ to be relatively comfortable.

bk109 has it right here. ICS runs well on older hardware, and it definitely doesn't need 1GB+ of RAM to run. It runs much smoother on my old Droid X than Gingerbread ever did (both stock and custom ROMs), and the phone has 512MB of RAM. Considering that JB has a large focus on performance, it *should* run even better on the hardware. However, that depends on how much of the performance improvements come from offloading operations to GPUs, which are poor/lacking in older devices.

Read it again. I said that below 512 is futile (the 4.0 CDD lists 340MB as required for the kernel and userspace) as there needs to be some wiggle room for the apps (some seems to gobble 100MB without blinking, like say Facebook). 1GB and above leave plenty of such wiggle room. Remember that with Android, even the Launcher is treated as just another app. So if you start a memory hungry app on a constrained device, the launcher may be tossed out of ram. Then when you hit the home button, the hungry app needs to be tossed out before the launcher can be loaded again.

C'mon guys, do a bit of research; you'll be waiting another 26 iterations of Android before there's a chance to use the letter J again! Android is on K next - Key Lime Pie apparently. Then L of course... I'm hoping for Lemon Drizzle.

Demento wrote:

Given that The Goog doesn't support ICS on the Nexus One, and that it's not a target for CM9 either, you can consider that to be a baseline. Stuff more powerful than the Nexus One/HTC Desire should be fine.

That being said, it's really about internal storage and RAM. The N1 and Desire have the power, but not the storage.

I believe the main reason (or at least one of the main reasons) the Nexus One isn't supported is because of it's Adreno 200 GPU not being powerful enough to offload all that 2D hardware accelerated drawing that has been supported since ICS.

Happysin wrote:

Good to see Google return to form with the release of the source code.

StarKruzr wrote:

Remember when Honeycomb happened, there was no source drop, and Android haters crowed about how Google was selling out its fanbase and developer base, claiming Google would never release source code again and that they were no better than Microsoft?

What are the system requirements? How far back can CyangenMon bring JB-there are some decent older tablets that would do well with a proper tablet oriented OS rather than 2.3 or even 2.2.

Given that The Goog doesn't support ICS on the Nexus One, and that it's not a target for CM9 either, you can consider that to be a baseline. Stuff more powerful than the Nexus One/HTC Desire should be fine.

That being said, it's really about internal storage and RAM. The N1 and Desire have the power, but not the storage.

Of course, that doesn't mean that you can't use ICS or JB on one of those devices. CM9 isn't officially supported for my G2 (Desire Z), but there are plenty of unofficial builds out there, as well as other ICS roms. I'm currently running Andromadus Mimicry, and it's excellent.

Shoot, and I JUST got CM9 running on my Nook Color. Oh well, if they decide to roll a version of JB for the NC, I'll be down with OPP (yeah, you know me).

I'm just not sure the pain is worth it to go to 9 since I'm happy with 7.2.

Now that you've done the upgrade, how are you feeling about it?

I don't really use mine as anything other than a reader, and for that, it works marvelously. I use Kindle, Google Reader, All Recipes, Epicurious, and Chrome a lot, and it's really nice as a "take it to bed and read" device at the end of the day, as well as being great for in the kitchen When I had CM7.2, I could run video better...but I didn't use it like that. There's still some hardware acceleration issues, but the OpenGL version does a good job of quashing most of the problems. If you don't use it for video that often, it's worth checking it out.

Also, I had the "vampire draw", so when I ran CM7.2, with wifi on, it would die pretty quickly. With CM9, the wifi shuts off automatically, so I can just keep it on without fear of the thing being dead when I want to use it. That alone, for me, is worth the switch.

I believe the main reason (or at least one of the main reasons) the Nexus One isn't supported is because of it's Adreno 200 GPU not being powerful enough to offload all that 2D hardware accelerated drawing that has been supported since ICS.

I believe the OP was actually correct, lack of available flash storage was at least the reason I was given by friends at Google as to why my N1 was never upgraded to ICS. The Nexus S received slightly reduced form of ICS for the same reason (some features were chopped due to lack of space). In some cases this isn't necessarily due to the size of the ROM but rather the partitioning. Past versions of Android were partitioned since the user storage was made available via USB mass storage, which requires block level access, which obviously isn't feasible for the system partition. This however has the unfortunate side effect that if the OS grows larger than the initial choice of partition size, then upgrades become problematic, as trying to do on-the-fly partition resizing during a firmware upgrade is a bit dangerous and increases the likelihood of bricking in the error case (and might not be possible at all if the user partition is full). ICS and up support MTP which mitigates this problem since the OS can now use a single unified partition, but that doesn't help for those upgrading from older OS revisions.

The Adreno 200 gpu actually is more than sufficient for ics and Qualcomm did provide some updated drivers so nasty compatibility hacks aren't needed for gpu stuff (still needed for camera and video decoding though) and overall performance is really pretty smooth. The N1's real problem is that it has way too little internal storage and thus requires hacks to move some system apps and data to the SD card. Fortunately the OG Dinc and the Evo Wimax 4g have plenty of internal space so for those devices a supported cm9/10 is more likely.

I believe the OP was actually correct, lack of available flash storage was at least the reason I was given by friends at Google as to why my N1 was never upgraded to ICS. The Nexus S received slightly reduced form of ICS for the same reason (some features were chopped due to lack of space). In some cases this isn't necessarily due to the size of the ROM but rather the partitioning. Past versions of Android were partitioned since the user storage was made available via USB mass storage, which requires block level access, which obviously isn't feasible for the system partition. This however has the unfortunate side effect that if the OS grows larger than the initial choice of partition size, then upgrades become problematic, as trying to do on-the-fly partition resizing during a firmware upgrade is a bit dangerous and increases the likelihood of bricking in the error case (and might not be possible at all if the user partition is full). ICS and up support MTP which mitigates this problem since the OS can now use a single unified partition, but that doesn't help for those upgrading from older OS revisions.

Not arguing, but do you happen to know what was removed from ICS for Nexus S? I have both but didn't really check the Nexus S between upgrading to ICS and passing it on to my SO.

Shoot, and I JUST got CM9 running on my Nook Color. Oh well, if they decide to roll a version of JB for the NC, I'll be down with OPP (yeah, you know me).

I'm just not sure the pain is worth it to go to 9 since I'm happy with 7.2.

Now that you've done the upgrade, how are you feeling about it?

I don't really use mine as anything other than a reader, and for that, it works marvelously. I use Kindle, Google Reader, All Recipes, Epicurious, and Chrome a lot, and it's really nice as a "take it to bed and read" device at the end of the day, as well as being great for in the kitchen When I had CM7.2, I could run video better...but I didn't use it like that. There's still some hardware acceleration issues, but the OpenGL version does a good job of quashing most of the problems. If you don't use it for video that often, it's worth checking it out.

Also, I had the "vampire draw", so when I ran CM7.2, with wifi on, it would die pretty quickly. With CM9, the wifi shuts off automatically, so I can just keep it on without fear of the thing being dead when I want to use it. That alone, for me, is worth the switch.

Thanks. I don't do video on the tablet either -- mostly eReader and email at home and then internet, etc. while traveling. I agree the power savings might be worth an upgrade; mine does drain the battery pretty fast with WiFi on.

Also, if the stupid status bar app will stop crashing. It's better on 7.2 than 7.1, but still buggy.